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The Hamptons International Film Festival, in partnership with Silas Marder Gallery, has been delighted to bring you the Films on the Haywall series. We hope you’ve had a chance to bring family and friends to enjoy the outdoor showings. For those you who haven’t, don’t miss the series’ final three screenings, Friday’s at 9:00pm through Labor Day. Pack up that lawnchair or picnic blanket and we’ll see you at the movies!

In 2009, HIFF had the east coast premiere of a wonderful documentary called Big River Man. It’s not often that documentaries seem larger than life, bigger than anything you can imagine, but this film achieved that through both a wild protagonist and intrepid director, John Maringouin, whom we were thrilled to have attend the Festival.

The film follows overweight 53-year-old Martin Strel, who appears to be far from the incarnation of good health, yet in his current state he has achieved records for the world’s longest consecutive swims, including the entirety of the Yangtze and Danube Rivers. Documentarian John Maringouin boldly followed Strel as he embarked on a journey to complete the world’s longest ever swim: the Amazon River. Maringouin risked his life to make this film and tell Strel’s amazing story. The film won our Wouter Barendrecht Pioneering Vision Award.

Unfortunately, John’s life is in danger again. After suffering from what he thought was chronic asthma for nearly a decade, his condition worsened and it was discovered that he had a tumor in his lung. His friends and family have started a fundraising page to help pay for the surgery. We decided to share this and hope you can give money to his cause because we believe John still has more to say, more things to make, and more adventures to go on. He is a filmmaker with a unique vision of the world and once we help him get past this we can’t wait to see what he’ll give back to us.

“He is in a fighting spirit but is in need of an operation pronto! Being uninsured, he is being forced to go out-of-pocket for the procedure for which he was just quoted a price tag of $214K. Such is the state of health care in this country. He will not even be able to book the procedure without proving a nearly $60K down-payment. Since time is of the essence, THAT is our immediate goal, to get him the money to at least book the surgery.”

“Well…when my lung went phooooey last week and I got told I’d have to cough up a new Lexus as a deposit, I couldn’t have imagined that 72 hours later
my friends would pull together more than half that money online. Wow. To say I’m humbled and amazed by that isn’t enough… I must do something for you. I haven’t figured out what but it’s coming. All I know is I’m one lucky guy to have you as friends. And now that the hospital barons knows who you are (a bunch of funky badass filmmakers) they’re scared shitless. So this thing may end well.
Regardless, when it’s all over, and “Someone Saved my Life Tonite” comes back around again on the classic rock loop at midnight, instead of imagining a curvacious redhead hovering o’er my bedside, I’ll see all of your beautiful faces. You know who you are: ( I was gonna post all of your names but FB wouldn’t let me tag more than a handful) Thank you all bigtime for the love and support. I love you.”

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The film was a smash success with a sold out crowd and Tony Bennett (@ItsTonyBennett) in the audience. Following the screening was a Q & A with Tony, his son Danny who conceived, created, and produced the film and Alec Baldwin (@ABFalecbaldwin). The father and son dynamic was quite a thing to behold. The rapport between the two is unparallelled and obviously fruitful as Danny has successfully managed Tony’s career for the last 30 years. Together they have created the Emmy Award-winning documentary Tony Bennett: The Music Never Ends and the Emmy Award-winning live music series Live By Requestas well as countless other projects. The Zen of Bennett marks another significant step in their career together.

Remember to check out Tony Bennett’s latest album, Duets II. For more information on his upcoming concerts and projects, visit his official website: https://tonybennett.com/

Sight & Sound unveiled this decade’s list last week with arguably the biggest shake-up to the list since the poll first hit newsstands in 1952. After a nearly 50-year reign as the consensus “Greatest Film Ever Made”, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane cedes the number one spot to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

Considered by many scholars and cinephiles alike to be the definite canonical list, Sight & Sound’s poll queried a total of 846 critics and 358 directors on their choices for cinema’s most outstanding achievements.

While we’re in the midst of whittling down our lists of films to be screened at the 20th anniversary edition of Hamptons International Film Festival, the HIFF team took a breather and selected their favorite films from Sight & Sound’s Top 50 list.

Every Monday evening in the month of August at 7:30pm, The Hampton Synagogue, in partnership with the Hamptons International Film Festival, will be presenting the Westhampton Jewish Film Festival located at Hampton Arts Cinema 2 Brook Road, Westhampton Beach, NY.

Admission is complimentary.

Please, RSVP to 631.288.0534 ext. 10 as limited seating is available.

The range of award winning and critically acclaimed films presented for the remainder of August includes:

It’s inspiring true story about two thirteen-year-old girls who were, on the eve of World War II, great dancing and acting stars in Zagreb. Selling out theatre venues, they were praised in the most superb headlines by the Croatian and European press. They were filmed by Parisian Pathe and Berlin’s UFA.

During the Nazi persecution of Jews and the later German nationals’ flight from communists, a dramatic friendship was born through entertainment, dance, but also anxiety. This led towards an unexpected end.

Twelve years after he was ordained as a priest Romuald Waszkinel found out that he was born to Jewish parents, that his name was Jakub Weksler. Torn between two worlds, a priest in the Polish Catholic church, and an observant Jew. Two conflicting identities that cannot co-exist, but Weksler/Waszkinel is unable to give up either one, each of which demands that he decide who he is.

Torn follows his amazing journey from conducting mass in a church in Poland to life as an observant Jew in a religious kibbutz in Israel.

Hanna Medelssohn is an 80 year old widow and a proud member of the kibbutz she helped to establish. She strongly believes in the values of social equality and cooperation on which the kibbutz was created.

Hannah’s world disintegrates as the privatization of the Kibbutz forces her into retirement and, after years of hard work and devotion, she finds herself useless. In addition she has to watch the Kibbutz turn into a community in which everyone is mainly concerned for his or her own well-being.

After all her hopes are dashed Hanna realizes that friendship still exists on the Kibbutz and that though things will never be the same, something new can flourish.

HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE is the story of two coalitions—ACT UP and TAG (Treatment Action Group)—whose activism turned AIDS from a death sentence into a manageable condition. Faced with their own mortality, a group of mostly HIV-positive men and women broke the mold as radical warriors taking on Washington and the medical establishment.

First-time director and award-winning journalist David France has covered the AIDS crisis for 30 years. In HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGE, France culls a vast array of archival footage to create not just a historical document, but also a visceral recreation of the period through the personal stories of some of movement’s leading participants. HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE captures the epic day-by-day battles that finally made AIDS survival possible.

How do you view activism and its effectiveness in today’s culture compared with that of the ‘80s? You’ve mentioned that the AIDS movement was “the first kind of self-documented movement.” ACT UP utilized every type of media outlet available at the time (Public Access TV, Street Theater, Teach-Ins, rally’s, etc.), what sort of difference do you think the Internet and connectivity that exists today could have made?

Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and smartphones make organizing a
demonstration easy. They drove tens of thousands of people into the Arab
Spring movement, and filled plazas for Occupy Wall Street. They’re the
powerful tools behind the pro-democracy movement in Moscow and the
anti-austerity grassroots protests in Buenos Aires, Athens, Madrid, and
elsewhere. But for lasting impact, none of those organizing efforts has
yet proved as effective as ACT UP, which operated at the early dawn of
modern connectivity. The people in ACT UP prefigured much of the coming
social network revolution. Their camcorders were the early version of
flip phone cameras. Instead of texting, they pulled together flash mobs
(though they called them “zaps”) via the Phone Tree: Peter calls 10
people, who in turn call 10 people, an so on. Public Access TV was the
early YouTube equivalent. And cell phones did exist then — they were
the size of a loaf of bread, and were prohibitively expensive to own,
but ACT UP rented them regularly so that they could the alert the press
after chaining themselves to some bureaucrat’s ankles, something you
might announce with a Facebook post today. So they weren’t operating in
a totally primitive time, technologically speaking. But lacking
hyper-connectivity had its advantages back then. ACT UP members carried
on all their discussions and strategy sessions face-to-face. They met
every Monday, and in committees even more often. They worked out
disputes and encouraged a kind of creativity and boldness that we
haven’t seen yet in the current movements. It makes me wonder if
Facebook might have hindered the work back then. Unplugging can be its
own powerful social networking tool.

You and your team are creating a new timeline featuring activism on and for AIDS. Could you explain what role you hope this film and timeline will play in the ongoing AIDS crisis?

The online timeline we launched last week is essentially an interactive
version of the events in the film. It’s the brainchild of Tricia
Finneran, who with her team at Veritas is enacting our engagement
campaign around the film. We’re tweeting and Facebooking on the
milestones of the epidemic domestically and globally, with an emphasis
on the role of activism. By the time HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE hit
theaters on September 21, the timeline will be fully populated for the
years 1981 to 1996, when effective AIDS drugs finally changed the
disease prognosis. We want the public to share their experiences in that
time period, with pictures and videos and recollections. And as the film
rolls out and takes a life of its own following September, we want to
see the timeline build into the present and the future. Our underhanded
goal of course is to enthrall people with the history and power of
activism to the point where they want to sign up and take activism into
the future. There’s plenty of work on the ground for contemporary AIDS
advocates. For one thing, the lifesaving drugs aren’t reaching 28
million people in the developing world, for whom surviving the plague is
still only a dream. Think what ACT UP-style activism might do to address
that crisis!

The AIDS movement had pointed and specific goals in regards to the results it wanted, whereas Occupy Wall Street has a breadth of issues it wants to address. Do you feel this umbrella activism is useful or is it holding it back?

Actually, ACT UP was also engaged in “umbrella activism,” to use your
term. As an organization, under the mandate of fighting AIDS, it had a
massive agenda: Convince society of the humanity of gays and IV-drug
users; change news coverage of the epidemic; promote condom us and
needle exchange; make hospitals into safe places for the sick; force Big
Pharma to invest in AIDS research; change the way the NIH investigates
basic science and the FDA regulates drugs (reorganize both agencies);
incorporate women and people of color into trials; build housing for
homeless people with HIV; transform how insurance deals with the disease
and how lawmakers criminalize the afflicted; win a place for patients at
the table; and liberate government funding for all of the above. It
succeeded spectacularly in most of these areas — and remember, they
were in the trenches for most of a decade doing this work. What they
didn’t accomplish, to the lasting disappointment of many members, was
the ultimate goal of nationalizing health care in America, which is as
huge a goal as anything the Occupy people have envisioned and a debate
that burns as hotly today as it did then.